One owner, one voice? Testing a central premise of newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership policy

Empirical questions about the relationship between ownership structure and media content are central to the debate about media ownership policy in the United States. At the core of the debate is the concern that an individual or company owning multiple media outlets will slant news and opinion in an attempt to distort public opinion and or influence public policy. The premise is that a single owner represents a single voice, regardless of how many media outlets the owner operates. This article, which features a study of news and commentary about the 2004 presidential campaign from commonly owned newspapers, television stations and radio stations in three communities, tests the validity of the one owner, one voice premise in the context of newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership. The results of the study - one of the very few studies of newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership to incorporate radio content - suggest that there is no empirical basis for believing that cross-owned media do any less than other media to serve the public interest.